2023-Oct-31

DFHorror, the start

Idea for a new project, first attempts.

From (not so) innocent web cartoons to some sinister fantasy stuff

DFHorror is the working title of this project. In the end it will most likely be a loose collection of images, animations and texts. The name is short for dark fantasy horror, and at some point I need a real title.

Originally I got the idea from webcartoons. The idea is to use blender, but have the thing very 2d-ish. Means, only flat layers, arranged behind eachother, with as less efford as possible.

The first test render from this concept looks like this:

Low poly image of a humanlike, bend over walking creature. The creature is hardly recognizable under a lot of rags and a hood. In the background are some rough mountain silhouettes, the sky has an unnatural color gradient going from a venomous violet in one corner, to a dark blue in the center, to a unfriendly sulphur yellow in the other corner. The lighting is very dim.

It soon became obvious that this character, the way it is constructed, can't be animated well. At this point I could have take a deeper dive into cut out techniques, but instead I decided to switch back to a (to me) more familiar low poly style and do some "real" 3D.

Before diving deeper into this topic, a look behind the curtains:

The view of the scene described above inside blender. The perspective is different, so the different layers can be observed. The character has an armature; the lights which create the multi-colored sky are pictured as well.

As can be seen, the character got an armature at least, but some quick tests revealed that it is very difficult to work with this. Therefore the decision to switch over to lowpoly 3D. If you look at the filenames of the images and wonder about "fahocu" - I barely remember myself. Most like "fantasy horror cutout", but not entirely sure.

On top of that, I did some post pro in the compositor (using the new 3D viewports' live preview, awesome new blender feature!), but it is not very noteworthy, just some color balancing.

And what happened to my new attempt in 3D, is a topic of the next post!